First-Ever Excavation of Nazi Death Camp Treblinka Reveals Horrors

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The first-ever archaeological excavations at the Nazi death camp
Treblinka have revealed new mass graves, as well as the first
physical evidence that this camp held gas chambers, where
thousands of Jews died.

Presented in a new documentary, "Treblinka: Hitler's Killing
Machine," which will air Saturday (March 29) on the Smithsonian
Channel, the excavations reveal that the
Nazis weren't as adept at covering up their crimes as they
believed when they razed the death camp in 1943. Brick walls and
foundations from the gas chambers remain, as do massive amounts
of human bone, including fragments now eroding out on the
forested ground surface.

"For me, that was quite shocking," said project leader Caroline
Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist who normally works with
police to find modern murder victims. "These artifacts are there,
and these human remains are on the surface, and they're not being
recorded or recovered."

Treblinka's horror

Of all the atrocities of Hitler's Third Reich, Treblinka is one
of the most mind-boggling. Historians estimate that about 900,000
Jews were murdered at this concentration camp in Nazi-occupied
Poland over a mere 16 months.

The Nazis began deporting Jews, mostly from the ghettos of Warsaw
and Radom, to Treblinka in July 1942. There were two camps.
Treblinka I was a forced-labor camp where prisoners were made to
manufacture gravel for the Nazi war effort. A little more than a
mile (2 kilometers) away was Treblinka II, a horrendously
efficient death camp. [ 7
Absolutely Evil Medical Experiments ]

Jews were sent to Treblinka II on trains, told they were simply
going to a transit camp before being sent on to a new life in
eastern Europe. The deception was elaborate: Nazis erected a fake
train station in the remote spot, complete with false
ticket-counter and clock.

"There was an orchestra set up near the reception area of the
camp to play," Colls told Live Science. "It was run by a famous
composer at the time, Artur Gold."

Gold, a Jewish violinist from Warsaw, was kept alive at Treblinka
both to entertain the Nazi guards and to run the orchestra. He
died at the camp in 1943.

The Jewish deportees were split into two groups, one of men and
the other of women and children, and ordered to undress for
"delousing." After handing over their valuables and documents,
the victims were sent to the gas chambers, which were pumped full
of exhaust from tank engines. Within about 20 minutes, some 5,000
people inside would be killed by
carbon monoxide poisoning. Corpses were initially buried in
mass graves, but later in 1942 and 1943, Jewish slave laborers
were forced to reopen the graves and cremate the bodies on
enormous pyres.

Hidden atrocities

But because the Nazis razed Treblinka's death camp in 1943,
little physical evidence of this genocide remained. What was
known about Treblinka came from Nazi confessions and the
eyewitness descriptions of very few survivors, most of whom were
never allowed near the gas chambers. [ Images:
Missing Nazi Diary Resurfaces ]

But as an archaeologist, Colls knew that "the landscape could
never be sanitized in that way," she said. She began assessing
Treblinka as an
archaeological site in 2007. Her emphasis was on using
"non-invasive" archaeological methods, including
geophysical surveys of the site and visual inspection.

"What we wanted to do at that stage was to asses what, if
anything, survived below ground," Colls said.

Since that time, Colls has also led a lidar
survey of the wooded site. Lidar is a method that uses lasers
to measure the distance between the ground and the airplane-borne
instrument. By scanning the ground with lidar, archaeologists can
detect depressions and mounds that
might indicate manmade structures. Lidar allows researchers
to virtually strip away the vegetation that might obscure these
features on the ground.

"What that revealed was the presence of previously unknown mass
graves," Colls said.

The suspected mass grave sites were in Treblinka I, the labor
camp. The story of the labor camp is less well-known than the
story of the death camp, which is now marked by a memorial.
But the labor camp was no less brutal, Colls said: Eyewitnesses
report seeing men hacked to death alive, and beatings and murder
were commonplace. The largest of the mass graves as revealed on
lidar was 63 feet by 58 feet in size (19.2 by 17.6 meters).

Indeed, when the archaeology team began digging to confirm the
lidar results, they uncovered shoes, ammunition, and bones —
including bones with cut marks indicating that the victims had
been stabbed or otherwise assaulted.

After digging three small test trenches to confirm each mass
grave, Colls and her team reburied the remains. Jewish rabbinical
law prohibits the disruption of a gravesite, so the aim was never
to disinter the bodies. But placing the bones back in the grave
was emotionally difficult, Colls said.

"I think it never actually crossed my mind that it would actually
be me who would re-inter the remains," she said. "I think
sometimes the hardest thing to do was to actually re-inter the
remains, and to backfill the trenches over the gas chamber, for
example, because it felt like you were almost putting a lid on
it."

Finding the gas chamber

The gas chamber was the subject of the teams' second dig. There
were two sets of gas chambers built at Treblinka, the first with
a capacity of about 600 people, the second able to hold about
5,000.

Colls and her team conducted four excavations at Treblinka II.
The first two revealed a strange find — a fossilized shark tooth,
and sand. Evidently, the Nazis dumped sand from a nearby quarry
over the remains of the
death camp to disguise them.

The second two trenches, however, revealed a brick wall and
foundation. The gas chambers were the only brick buildings in the
camp, Colls said. The excavations also revealed orange tiles that
matched eyewitness descriptions of the floor of the killing
chambers. Chillingly, each tile was stamped with a Star of David,
likely part of the Nazi subterfuge that the building was a
Jewish-style bathhouse.

"Treblinka had never been looked at since the period after the
war," Colls said. "And everybody had assumed that because the
history books said it was destroyed, it was."

The excavations prove otherwise, she said. Colls is now working
on an exhibition of the findings to go on display at Treblinka,
as well as a book about the work. There are plans to go back and
dig at an
execution site near the labor camp to confirm the presence of
a mass grave, she said, and there may be more work near the gas
chambers.

The hope, Colls said, is to bring the atrocities to light,
understand them, and hopefully prevent future
genocides. To that end, she says, she channels the emotion of
uncovering victims' remains to finding more answers.